A collection of four short stories, each concerned with the damage and hurt that humans do to one another, Eric LaRocca has created an intense, prosaic series of horror tales.
Opening with the eponymous This Skin Was Once Mine, the idea of trauma, but more importantly the lasting effect it has, is never more so poetically captured. Soaked into her skin, Jillian’s perspective is saturated in victimhood though she sees herself as a monster. This odd contradiction plays out in a number of ways: her parents and her feelings toward them; her treatment by others. Called back to her childhood home after a twenty year absence, her father’s funeral peels away the past to reveal something quite awful.
Deftly crafted, with little said explicitly until the end, the dread of the story is palpable yet frustratingly out of sight. As Jillian cuts through the obfuscations, she discovers layers of monstrosity right at the heart of her childhood and, thereby, within herself. It’s the disgusting and nasty cycle violence that family abuse creates laid bare in the words of a fairy tale. And, for that, it’s brutal.
Slightly more obscure in its telling, though clear in its meaning, Seedling is, once more, concerned with the death of a parent. Left completely anonymous, the narrator is never really known; a device that works well considering the direction the story takes. The father calls after the passing of the mother and, immediately the character goes to make sure he is alright.
What happens thereafter is a strange, mesmerisingly dark fantasy tale of wounds and hurts and the silences between people that are broken by shared grief. It’s not a complex idea, this notion of being let in to understand another’s suffering but it’s the twist in the story that makes it so much more. Those wounds fester; dark things are born there. In Seedlings it’s the revealing of those grievances, the releasing of them, that is so shocking.
Using an old fashioned quality to the writing, All The Parts Of You That Won’t Easily Burn reads like a classic. Propriety and social accountability permeate the story as Enoch immediately critiques a shopkeeper he has sought out. Looking to gift his husband a chef’s knife to mark a special dinner party they are hosting, Enoch, instead, finds himself beguiled. The shopkeeper, sensing something within Enoch, offers him a deal; the knife for a favour.
He wants to cut him and, though Enoch is initially repulsed, he acquiesces. Revelling in this strange new fetish, Enoch can’t get the man or the sensation out of his head. Obsessed with it, he finds his way back to the shop becoming more deeply embroiled in the activity. A disturbing yet compelling series of events, of opening up strange new associations, and breaking down of socially accepted codes, it’s a story that is as insidious as it is well crafted.
Prickle is hard define. There’s a sense of something more hidden behind the story and yet on the surface it’s two old friends reacquainting. In their seventies, both have past their prime yet their minds seem as sharp and as cruel as ever.
Playing a game to cause slight harm to unaware people, the two men enjoy the strange power they hold over the unsuspecting. But when one of them goes too far, it highlights a madness the other hadn’t seen before. What it says about the rationale and reasonings behind human games isn’t really clear but, for a short story, it’s an unsettling ending to a dark collection.
Swirling with malevolent and dangerous thoughts, This Skin Was Once Mine is a poetically written set of stories. Tinged with an atmosphere of the past and touching on some twisted truths, it’s a strange and gripping group of horror tales.
Review copy
Published by Titan Books
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